Confused Indian Anti-Piracy Group Asks Us To Remove Article It Doesn't Like From Some Other Blog

from the try-again-guys dept

Well, this is bizarre. A few hours ago, we received an email to our copyright notice email address from Aiplex, an Indian anti-piracy/SEO/medical transcription company. You may remember the company because we wrote a short post about them over a year ago, when its CEO said in an interview that it would resort to denial of service attacks on sites that didn't cooperate. We also noted that the somewhat confused company listed "Bram Cohen" as a type of BitTorrent client.

Anyway, I'd nearly forgotten about the company until we got this email. But the email is asking us to take down the post. Except, it's not. Rather than asking that we remove our post, it actually asks us to remove a copy of the post on a spam blog that appears to copy every Techdirt post (there are a bunch of sites out there that do this and get no traffic -- it makes no sense to us, but they're free to use our content that way, if they want). Here's the email:

This has reference to the below article on your webpage, we kindly request you to deactivate the link as the article is defaming the company’s image & its prospects. It was mis-interpreted by the news agency which was blown out of proportion by some of the pirates across the globe. And subsequently we have to face damages/threats from the pirates & undergo immense losses due to their attack on our servers/websites etc.

Although, we did declare that we are not involved in any of those activities as published in the article, we still have to face the consequences for reasons unknown.

Interesting stuff. First of all, they used our copyright notification email, and this issue has nothing to do with copyright. Second, they are asking us to remove our content from a site that is not ours, and which we have no control over. The content did, certainly, originate from our site, but they don't ask us to remove the content on our site. This does not speak highly of their technical skills, let alone their basic understanding of this World Wide Web we live on. Finally, as to the claim that this is "defaming," the article directly quotes the company's CEO.

Anyway, seeing as we don't control the web page they've asked us to take down, we obviously won't be doing a damn thing about it, other than to publish this post and hope that, sometime in the future, Aiplex learns a little bit about how the web works.

Perhaps It Has a Specific Purpose

Let's assume they did this correctly and asked you to remove your post. Scenario: Legal sounding e-mail gets sent to you complaining of defamation. Two results: 1) You take it down or 2) you decide to fight it and refer them to your legal department.

Now assume that they know they have absolutely no reason to force you to remove this post. But they risk you sending legal letters back to them about who owns the copyright and yadda yadda yadda you suck up their time and money.

However, if they contact you and ask you to remove the blog post from another site there is a slight difference in the outcomes: 1) you recognize the blog posting as your own and diligently remove it, afraid to offend anyone or 2) you contact legal who says "wtf?" and you contact them who say "sorry, wrong people" and that's the end of it. They still might achieve their goal without risking a lengthy back-and-forth with you.

Donning a tinfoil hat, I'd say it's possible the run the content duping sites or pay someone to run them to dupe your content so they have this avenue (you said so yourself that there is no reason for these blogs to dupe your content).

Don't let that stop you.

Does this other site that copies Techdirt content, copy only the articles or does it copy/scrape entire pages with all of their embedded links intact?
If the latter, then maybe the Indians actually clicked on a copyright notification link on that other site, which of course points back to the real Techdirt.

That's kinda what the Indian dude is asking

It's true the the request isn't very clear, but it's kinda implied when he says "deactivate the link" he means either take down the article on your server so the link becomes dead, or move the article to a different URL so the old links don't work.

Both request are above what techdirt is required to comply with by law but they're not crazy request as you suggest.

You kinda come across as a bit dense actually, the Indian dude just sounds like he's over-confident in his communication skills in English.

Re: That's kinda what the Indian dude is asking

WTF are you talking about? The "Indian dude" references a copy of a Techdirt post on a completely different website: how would changing anything on the Techdirt server affect it in any way? (Tip: it wouldn't.)

You're not really in a position to accuse others of being "a bit dense".

Aiplexx = MPAA, don't forget

Apparently they are ddos users according to wikipedia source of all knowledge on the internets. I'm guessing that they really don't want to be the target of a ddos attack. Why anyone would aim an attack at these silly bozos i don't know.

A number of similar Indian companies have popped up of late. These people also falsely reporting copyright infringement and filing takedown notices on content they do not own, nor do they represent the copyright owner of the alleged infringing content. They are falsely and illegally having content removed from video hosting sites on a daily basis because they know a counter-notice will not be filed. A better job must be done by service providers to ensure that the reporting process must authenticate if the content is actually owned by the person reporting it, or if that person is actually an authorised agent.

They don't even understand Google Ads

Our case is also bizarre. This company is threatening us since once our ads appeared on a certain blog which they claim us copyrighted material. In the screenshot they provided, that Add is shown through Google Ads where the ads you see are based on our Google search history.